Ben Johnson and Seoul's dubious legacy

FILE - In this Sept. 24, 1988 file photo, Canada's Ben Johnson gestures, after setting a world record for the men's 100-meter and winning a gold medal in the Seoul Summer Olympics. Johnson has a book coming out next month in which he claims that he was sabotaged at the Seoul Games in 1988 by a "mystery man" who supposedly spiked his beer with steroids. The book also includes a claim that Johnson, in a previous incarnation, was an Egyptian pharaoh. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher, File)
— AP

FILE - In this Sept. 24, 1988 file photo, Canada's Ben Johnson gestures, after setting a world record for the men's 100-meter and winning a gold medal in the Seoul Summer Olympics. Johnson has a book coming out next month in which he claims that he was sabotaged at the Seoul Games in 1988 by a "mystery man" who supposedly spiked his beer with steroids. The book also includes a claim that Johnson, in a previous incarnation, was an Egyptian pharaoh. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher, File)
/ AP

I remember the plane descending over rice paddies to Seoul’s Gimpo Airport for the 1988 Olympics. I remember the U.S. men’s volleyball team playing in a gym so sweltering that Karch Kiraly was on hands and knees after every point, mopping the sweat from the floor. I remember Greg Louganis smacking the diving board with his head and spilling blood in the pool. I remember the Brazilian journalists keeping everyone awake all night with wild parties in the media village.

But mostly, I think back 25 years and I remember Ben Johnson’s eyes.

They were yellow.

We learned why a few days after the Canadian sprinter won the 100 meters in a world-record 9.79 seconds, after famously turning to his left as he crossed the finish line to cast a haunting glare at American Carl Lewis. Johnson stared through eyes jaundiced from a liver overloaded with anabolic steroids.

The 25th anniversary of his positive test is Thursday, and it remains a landmark moment in sports history.

It was not the beginning of the steroid era, nor the end of it. But it was the beginning of big athletes being caught at big events, the beginning of our consciousness about performance-enhancing drugs, the beginning of our cynicism.

Five others from the eight-man 100 final at Jamsil Stadium have since been linked to doping, among them Lewis, still recognized as the gold medalist despite revelations that he failed pre-Games tests for banned stimulants but was given a pass by the U.S. Olympic Committee. There were no unannounced, out-of-competition tests back then, and science was unable to detect many substances that athletes wouldn’t dare touch today. Use whatever you want, however much you want. It was your basic free-for-all.

A single urine sample changed everything.

Out-of-competition testing began the following year. Sports governing bodies began investing money (although not nearly enough) in new testing machinery and methodology. Independent anti-doping agencies such as WADA and USADA were conceptualized and, eventually, launched. Media began paying attention to the relationship between appearance and achievement.

But Johnson’s positive test cut another, more insidious way. It sent the message that you might get caught. It also sent the message that you will get faster.

In “The dirtiest race in history,” a riveting 2012 book about the 100-meter final in Seoul, British author Richard Moore recounts how a telephone hotline was established to help educate U.S. athletes about the perils of doping. And how Dr. Robert Voy, the USOC’s chief medical officer at the time, told him one question kept getting asked over and over from the anonymous callers: “How can I get what Ben Johnson was taking?”

So two trains left the station 25 years ago in Seoul, racing down parallel tracks, tossing coal into each other’s engines. The anti-doping police cast a wider net and hauled in bigger and bigger fish – Marion Jones, Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong. And each time it did, athletes became more emboldened to get what they’re taking.

A conflicted legacy, to be sure.

And one, few people realize, that almost never happened.

In 1997, I was working on a story about the state of doping in sports and I visited a scientist at the Mission Valley offices of Quest Diagnostics. Victor Uralets had a doctorate degree in organic chemistry from the Institute of Organoelement Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences and, before emigrating to the West, was scientific director for Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory. He told me something stunning.

Following reciprocal boycotts of the 1980 and ’84 Summer Games, Ted Turner had created the Goodwill Games in hopes of repairing frayed relations between global superpowers through sport. The inaugural Goodwill Games were hosted in Moscow in 1986, and Uralets’ lab handled the drug testing.

In those days, the holy grail for Uralets and his anti-doping peers was stanozolol, also known as Winstrol V, a potent anabolic steroid that they surmised certain athletes were using to great advantage and that they struggled to detect.

Uralets got a positive for stanozolol.

“It was huge, huge news for us,” he says.

Only numerical codes, and not names, are attached to urine samples sent to the lab for testing, but Uralets told me he deduced the stanozolol positive came from the men’s 100 meters and “figured out” it could be from the champion. The champion: a 24-year-old Canadian sprinter who, despite a poor start, still blew away Lewis and the rest of the field in 9.95 seconds, then a world-record at low altitude.

Benjamin Sinclair Johnson.

Uralets forwarded the unnamed positive result to his superiors. Urine is split into A and B samples, and the protocol following a positive result is for the B sample to be re-tested in the presence of the offending athlete.

It never got that far. For reasons Uralets says he never learned, the stanozolol positive was quashed. No stripped title. No two-year ban. No press conferences. No proof to athletes that stanozolol could, indeed, be detected.

Maybe it was an innocent oversight. Or maybe it was the politics of a thawing Cold War, and Soviet officials didn’t want to bust the West’s top sprinter in the interest of goodwill and glasnost.

“I think it was used without any hesitation,” Uralets, now the director of sports testing for Redwood Toxicology Laboratory in Santa Rosa, says of the mysterious stanozolol positive, “that the person was confident it was not detectable. It was not careful use.”

The drug of choice for Johnson, we know now, was stanozolol, under the supervision of Dr. Jamie Astaphan from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. And it was not always careful use.

Johnson pulled a hamstring early in the 1988 season and still wasn’t running well when he returned to competition ahead of the Olympics. Twenty-six days before he took the track in Seoul, Johnson injected the milky-white substance in one final push for health and speed – just inside the 30-day window that Astaphan advised was safe from detection.

Understand that Uralets is a scientist, and that he deals in blacks and whites, not shades of grey. In facts, not conjecture. Sixteen years after he told me the story from the 1986 Goodwill Games, he is more dismissive, more guarded, saying: “It was pure guessing. How accurate it is, I don’t know.”

He declines to speculate how history might have been altered, to wonder how Seoul’s dubious legacy might be different 25 years on. Scientists don’t play the what-if game.